When it comes to controversy in the fast food industry, KFC has not been immune to some
of the worst of it.
So let's take a fresh look back at some of the biggest scandals to ever hit the fried
chicken chain.
There are plenty of urban legends involving fast food, and KFC found itself targeted with
a particularly weird one when bogus rumors resurfaced in 2014 that the chain had been
genetically modifying chickens to create bigger, meatier birds.
That evolved into fake claims that the company's rebranding from Kentucky Fried Chicken to
KFC was legally required because the mutant creatures they were frying up were technically
not chickens.
Although Snopes easily debunked the rumors, they became so prevalent in China that KFC's
parent company, Yum!
Brands, sued three Chinese tech firms for allowing doctored photos of these monstrous,
but entirely imaginary, creatures to proliferate on its social media platforms.
Yum!
Brands won the suit but was awarded only a small fraction of the damages sought.
Nevertheless, a KFC spokesperson said that the company was pleased with the outcome.
"Oh my God, my sister told me about KFC breeding these mutant chickens."
"They wouldn't stay alive, though, would they?
Look, how is it even possible to get mutant chickens?"
In 2014, Yum!
Brands was rocked by a news story that originated in China.
A TV journalist went undercover in a factory owned by Shanghai Husi Food Co., which supplied
meat to Yum!-owned fast food restaurants throughout China, and captured footage of employees mixing
old, expired meat with fresh meat.
Shanghai authorities ordered Husi to suspend all operations, while the Shanghai Municipal
Food and Drug Administration announced it would investigate claims of the alleged use
of expired raw food material production as well as the processing of it in food.
The repercussions were severe.
Ten employees involved in the scheme received prison sentences, while Husi's U.S. parent
company, OSI Group, was fined more than $300,000.
Yum!
Brands subsequently experienced a 16 percent drop in sales in the wake of the scandal.
In 2015, CNN reported that a customer at a Los Angeles KFC received a serious shock when
he opened up his box of food and dug into his order.
What he saw inside was terrifying.
It was a piece of chicken that appeared to have a small rodent-like body and long, thin
tail.
Upon closer inspection, the diner then made a stunning allegation: he had been served
a Kentucky Fried Rat.
"I got this rat.
This gnawing, teething, f---ing rat."
Photos of the man's dish certainly appeared to support his claim.
After he went public with his accusations, KFC investigated and tested the alleged rodent.
When the results were in, KFC issued a statement to ABC describing the results that read,
"Recently, a customer questioned the quality of a KFC product, and this received considerable
publicity given the sensational nature of his claim...The customer's attorney turned
over the product in question for testing at an independent lab, and the results officially
confirmed what KFC knew all along, the product was chicken and not a rat as he claimed."
KFC has made its share of mistakes, but this particular scandal is one in which they deservedly
emerged mostly unscathed.
When Papa John's founder John Schnatter was forced to resign after admitting to using
a racial slur, he tried to take KFC's founder Colonel Harland Sanders down with him as a
twisted way of attempting to justify his own behavior.
During a conference call, he complained that Sanders called black people the N-word without
ever facing the public backlash that Schnatter was enduring.
However, the family of the late Sanders, who founded Kentucky Fried Chicken in 1952 and
died in 1980, denied that the fast-food trailblazer ever used racist language.
In an interview with the Louisville Courier Journal, Sanders' grandson, Trigg Adams, blasted
Schnatter's assertion as, quote, "an absolute lie."
Furthermore, he described the ousted Papa John's founder as "a weasel."
According to Adams, Schnatter's accusation was simply a case of projecting his own bad
behavior onto someone else.
As he put it,
"Because he's prejudiced, he's trying to say somebody else was, too.
[Sanders] had absolutely no prejudice against anybody."
In August 2019, a woman named Rosi Lancaster picked up some chicken from a KFC in Annandale,
Australia, and was horrified when she began eating and realized it was a tad undercooked.
To be more precise, it was completely raw inside.
She took to Facebook and shared photos of the vile-looking pink meat that had been hidden
beneath KFC's signature crispy coating.
She wrote in the caption,
"Purchased on Friday from KFC Annandale.
Rang immediately after.
The girl on the phone seemed interested and asked me to email photos through and they
would call back.
No call back yet and no response..."
Lancaster's Facebook post went viral as it racked up thousands of comments, which prompted
KFC to finally issue an apology in which they said,
"We're very sorry to hear about this as it doesn't meet our very high standards of food
safety and we have been in touch with the customer to offer a full refund.
We're also currently in the process of undertaking a full review of the incident to understand
what has happened."
Actress Pamela Anderson has long been an animal rights activist, and she's also been a vocal
member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals for decades.
In 2008, she took aim at KFC over the treatment of their chickens.
In association with PETA, she presented a video documenting treatment of the chickens
along with the launch of a companion website, KentuckyFriedCruelty.com.
According to Anderson, when it comes to the Colonel's famed secret recipe:
"Sadly, the main ingredient is cruelty."
In the video, Anderson showcased footage of chickens enduring horrific conditions that
was allegedly shot at a slaughterhouse that supplied chickens to KFC.
This wasn't the first time that Anderson had attacked the chain.
In fact, she'd been calling for a boycott of KFC for nearly a decade at that point,
even visiting restaurants personally to protest.
When news of the video's production broke, KFC tried to head things off by telling the
Associated Press,
"We have an independent panel of outside experts who set our high standards.
They are the same standards that all our competitors use to insure humane treatment around the
country."
Anderson's protests may not have stopped KFC in its tracks, but it likely convinced a few
customers to think twice before ordering one of their buckets.
In 2014, a 7-year-old boy in Newcastle, England, was enjoying the KFC chicken that his stepmother,
Krystal Henderson, had picked up for him when he bit into a piece that was as hard as a
rock.
Upon inspection, Henderson discovered that the chicken wasn't chicken at all.
It was, in fact, a piece of blue paper towel that had apparently been deep fried.
As Henderson pointed out to The Express,
"The blue roll could have been used for anything, it could have bleach or disinfectant on it.
To give that to a child, I felt so guilty even though it wasn't my fault.
For a child to bite into that is horrendous."
To make matters worse, when Henderson returned to the restaurant to complain, she was told
to phone the customer service line.
Eventually, KFC issued an apology and a refund.
A spokesperson told The Express,
"We're very sorry for Ms. Henderson's experience and apologised to her immediately, as well
as giving her a refund at the time of the incident.
We take food quality and hygiene very seriously and unfortunately, on this extremely rare
occasion, our restaurant failed to meet the high standards that both we and our customers
expect.
We have retrained staff on our stringent food preparation procedures at this store to ensure
this doesn't happen again."
KFC surmised that the blue tissue most likely originated from a tissue roll used for hygiene
purposes and then fell into the batter undetected.
Most of the controversy that has surrounded KFC over the years has had to do with its
chicken.
But a 2017 hygiene scandal that erupted in the United Kingdom had nothing to do with
poultry.
A TV news report from that year investigating McDonald's, Burger King, and KFC tested samples
of ice from 10 different branches of each of these restaurants.
Five samples taken from KFC were found to have "significant" levels of fecal bacteria.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which is the government agency responsible
for setting U.K. water standards, says that the acceptable level of fecal bacteria in
drinking water is zero.
A spokesperson for KFC told The Independent that the company was "shocked and extremely
disappointed" by the test results and outlined the steps that were taken, explaining,
"We immediately shut down the ice machines in the restaurants affected to conduct a thorough
clean and inspection, and reinforced the importance of adhering to our strict procedures to all
employees."
Treating chicken with antibiotics is a matter of some debate.
While America's National Chicken Council has stated that the practice can be perfectly
safe and keeps birds healthy and consumers free of disease when done responsibly, there
remains some controversy about the pros and cons of this practice.
In 2016, several consumer advocacy groups banded together to launch a petition asking
KFC parent company Yum!
Brands to stop using chickens that had been treated with antibiotics.
As Lena Brook of the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the U.S. groups behind the
petition, put it,
"KFC is lagging woefully behind, diners around the country want KFC to step up."
The pressure tactics were apparently effective, as the following year, KFC announced plans
to stop using chickens treated with human antibiotics.
In 2020, KFC Australia ran an edgy TV commercial promoting its Zinger Popcorn Box that started
a backlash.
In the spot, a young woman wearing short shorts and a low-cut top is on her way to a music
festival.
Seeing a parked car with tinted windows, she tweaks her outfit, adjusting her cleavage
while looking at her reflection in the car's mirror-like windows.
As she makes adjustments to her top, the window rolls down to reveal two young boys with goofy
smiles on their faces, along with a grown woman expressing her disapproval.
Collective Shout, an Australian advocacy group dedicated to calling out the objectification
of women, put the commercial on blast, saying,
"Ads like this reinforce the false idea that we can't expect better from boys.
It is another manifestation of the 'boys will be boys' trope, hampering our ability to challenge
sexist ideas which contribute to harmful behavior towards women and girls."
In response to the controversy, KFC issued a statement that read,
"We apologize if anyone was offended by our latest commercial.
Our intention was not to stereotype women and young boys in a negative light."
In 2018, a bizarre confluence of events led British KFC restaurants to literally run out
of chicken.
It all began when the chain switched from its previous delivery company to DHL.
When a large car crash involving seven vehicles and at least one fatality took place at a
junction near DHL's main warehouse in the town of Rugby, police blocked off roads in
order to investigate.
The road closure left DHL's chicken-loaded trucks stuck in traffic, and KFC restaurants
without any chicken.
"My reaction is angry, sad, and disappointed."
KFC wound up temporarily shutting down two-thirds of its locations throughout the U.K. and Ireland,
with DHL taking responsibility and apologizing to hungry customers.
In response to the crisis, KFC contracted ad agency Mother to craft a clever ad campaign
to mitigate the damage with a little humor.
The agency cooked up a full-page ad featuring a KFC bucket, with the letters FCK substituted
for KFC.
As the ad joked,
"A chicken restaurant without any chicken.
It's not ideal.
It's been a hell of a week, but we're making progress, and every day more and more fresh
chicken is being delivered to our restaurants."
This sounds like the sort of story that might make you reconsider ever again asking the
question, "Why did the chicken cross the road?"
"Why did the chicken cross the road?"
"To get to the other side."
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